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European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

patrick-breyer.de

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Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#231

Post by estaseuropano »

throwaways885 wrote: post #110
bkor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK already has crazy laws around this. Brexit enabled more invasive laws to be implemented.

As somebody who was somewhat in-favour of Brexit (not popular here, admittedly), my view is that it's easier to fight for privacy against just the UK government, rather than the entire EU bloc. I think if an entity as powerful as the EU puts this into legislation, it's game over. I have a similar view on federal laws in the United States - they don't tend to repeal federal surveillance laws without violence.

But every member has a veto. You never needed to convince 28 countries, you only needed to convince your own government to vote against. Plenty of laws stuck in limbo because one country doesn't like it - but exactly zero laws on the books that sosme country really hates.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#232

Post by coding123 »

yarg wrote: post #140
dekrg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More end to end encryption use only means more laws banning encryption faster. Or do you really think that when for example DoH gains wider adoption all the countries using DNS based blocking will go "Oh well guess the techies got us".

Good luck with that - the genie's out of the bottle. End to end encryption is vital to the operations of modern businesses, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

You'd be surprised then how fast things bend and eventually break under government rule.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#233

Post by bwindels »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #151

It's becoming scary how dangerous legislation is passed under the guise of protecting against "child exploitation". It's basically political suicide for politicians to vote against it (since the public cannot understand the nuance).

Up to people who do understand it to expose the ones voting for it.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#234

Post by estaseuropano »

ashtonkem wrote: post #61

You do have to wonder about the long term stability of a nominal democracy where 72% of citizens oppose digital monitoring, while 77% of their representatives vote for laws they emphatically do not want. Put more bluntly, is this even a democracy in anything other than the trappings?

Its more complex than this. You cant put complex questions to simple referendum as a yes/no question (see brexit). Law making requires compromise and seeing the whole picture and its very easy to get people to say yes (or no) just depending on how you frame the question.

Great example is maternity leave: amazing thing, exists across Europe for a length of 4 to 36 months. In some countries moms can take nearly three years off, and still get paid. Great in principle but after three years (or more with more kids) those moms basically have no chance to get a job in their field as their knowledge is outdated and they often end in precarious low wage low skill jobs. I'm 200% in favour of maternity leave, but if you set the incentives wrong you don't help families more - you just kick women out of the workforce. So how do you put a referendum on this? You need trial, expertise, analysis - not a simple 'do you want 12 or 36 months of paid maternity leave' as most voters don't understand the long term consequences.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#235

Post by pessimizer »

geofft wrote: post #226
perihelions wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think you're glossing over the distinction between compelling material (by warrant, subpoena, &c.) -- what the Fourth Amendment covers -- and private entities voluntarily giving the government material that third parties have entrusted them. Nothing regulates the latter: that's the third-party doctrine.

The people you're replying to aren't glossing over it, the posted article (and the comments predicting the end of the European tech industry) is glossing over it. "European Parliament approves mass surveillance" really means "European Parliament suspends portion of privacy law that prevents third parties from voluntarily monitoring information entrusted to them" - as they're able to do in the US. The European Parliam…

This is a bizarre distinction to make when the third party doctrine has resulted in mass surveillance in the US.

> The European Parliament isn't (in this action, at least) compelling anyone to surveil anything.

Why shoot down something that you're adding to the article? Who said the European Parliament was compelling anyone to do anything?

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#236

Post by throwawayboise »

coding123 wrote: post #232
yarg wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that - the genie's out of the bottle. End to end encryption is vital to the operations of modern businesses, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

You'd be surprised then how fast things bend and eventually break under government rule.

Agreed. Most people, when confronted with the choice of jail vs. doing what they are told, will do what they are told.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#238

Post by upofadown »

klodolph wrote: post #96
swiley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use GPG. Don't use smartphones, don't use any closed software (especially non-free OSes.) Vote.

GPG doesn’t solve the problem of metadata surveillance. One of the major problems with technological solutions to privacy problems is that metadata surveillance is extremely useful to begin with, and it’s hard to make communication anonymous.

True but people with private communications don't usually need to hide their metadata. Who cares if they know you are communicating with your friends and family if they don't know you are complaining about the thin skinned government.

Anonymity is an issue, but it is far from the most important issue.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#239

Post by jlokier »

throwaways885 wrote: post #221
estaseuropano wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the issue was not EU control, rather the Ireland situation. The situation due solely to brexit required checks somewhere. Do you want new riots and civil war due to checks within Ireland? Should Ireland accept to effectively leave the common market and all its benefits just so there's no check between UK and Northern Ireland? Or this option. The UK killed all other scenarios by insisting that it wants to freely d…

> Brexit was a slim non-binding referendum run ammock for party-internal politics of the Tories. Absurd from start to finish and now you want to blame the EU for the consequences? I'm not saying that I agree with how things have turned out, nor am I blaming the EU, rather, just pointing out that they do have much control over global commerce. And this is anecdotal evidence of that. The EU could've had an internal bor…

> The EU could've had an internal border within it's own market, but that wasn't an option because they didn't want Ireland to be cut off.

That's not an EU decision as you're suggesting there.

Ireland isn't some vassal state. It's an equal partner.

Ireland itself doesn't want to cut Ireland off from the EU.

It's not for the EU to decide something like that. It's an Ireland decision, and in fact the power to do so resides with Ireland.

If Ireland had wanted to align with the UK and separate from the EU, they could have, and they still have the power to do so. Of course they don't want to, why would they. They've benefited enormously from EU membership, and one of those benefits now is that the EU often protects the interests of Ireland - as determined by Ireland - in negotiations with the UK.

It is important to remember that the EU is not actually a top down system, even though it can seem that way. Any member country is free to leave simply by giving notice, and cease to partake of the benefits of membership. The EU's laws are clear on this.

Re: European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communication

#240

Post by estaseuropano »

adventured wrote: post #220
estaseuropano wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an uninformed comment. By virtue of the eu legal process this law only exists because Italy voted in favour of it, like all other EU countries. Anything else you hear is spin. Also this lae doesn't oblige anyone to anything, its a temporary law that comes in as another law ran out, and the aim is to have a more thorough piece of legislation on the books in 3 years. For the record, UK has much worse laws…

Saying it's uninformed doesn't make it so, nice try at front-loading some argument from intimidation though. > For the record, UK has much worse laws already on the books, as do the US or Australia. First of all, who said that the US or UK didn't? That's misdirection. This story is about the EU. What I posited, is member states leaving the EU, those that are heavily concerned about privacy rights. What would that hav…

Sorry but please read the politico article posted a dozen times in this discussion. It is less agenda driven and wuotd clearly spells out this is just a law to allow providers to do it, not an obligation. In fact that provision existed before but was running out, thus this temporary law.

As regards the brexit comment, you are right my writing was unnecessarily harsh but you missed the main point:

> By virtue of the eu legal process this law only exists because Italy voted in favour of it, like all other EU countries.

The history of much EU bashing is that national governments vote YES in Brussels then turn around and say nationally 'really sorry we are obliged to implement this EU law' -- the very law they could have vetoed if they had wanted to. This is one of the basics of EU lawmaking which the previous commenter clearly was ignorant of.

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